Registration Systems for Returning Onsite
Churches are reopening but at full capacity with AHS guidelines in place. You can prevent disappointment and leaving people out in the rain/cold/heat/hail/ or all of the preceding for June – August weather in Alberta.
Pre-registering people is a practical way to adhere to guidelines, show consideration, and not have to turn people way on your first Sunday back onsite.
Call-in or Sign-up Registration
Decide on how many services and times that will be offered and inform your congregation and community in advance.
Communicate to your congregation the necessity to pre-register their attendance for adults and children.
Ask adults or families with children who have a cough, fever, shortness of breath, runny nose, or sore throat to absent themselves until well.
People can call the church office number or a dedicated cell number and register each family member.
If families are attending with a cohort family indicate that on registration so cohorts can sit together.
Set a registration cut-off time at least 24 hours before the service start time.
Online Registration
Make use of one of these registration systems to facilitate control of attendance numbers.
Breeze CHMS, a church database management system, created reopen.churches to allow people to register for your services at multiple times and in multiple rooms. As a church, all you have to do is create a form indicating your number of services, service time(s), and service capacity. The system will create a registration form for you where your members can specify which service they’re planning on attending. You can manage and view responses, as well as specify meeting location/room if you’re breaking into smaller meeting groups. The best part? The registration system is totally free. Breeze just wants to “Help the Church help people find and follow Jesus.”
You can create events, specify the location, date and time, and any other event details. Eventbrite allows you to customize your registration form a bit more than reopen.church, including the option to add custom registration questions. You can also limit the registration period. Eventbrite offers a free pricing tier as well as a paid premium tier.
Starting at $79 per month, Brushfire can help you provide professional-level registration for your services, giving you flexibility on how you set up your events, providing a mobile experience for your users through their app, and letting you create tickets that run out when your registration is full. You can ask for varying levels of personal information depending on your church’s needs, and even assign seats using their platform.
Text In Church offers a Smart Connect Card that you can use to let people plan their visit to your church. It’s already set up to ask people for their name, contact info, planned attendance date, and kids’ information. You can also use TIC for general church communication.
JotForm lets people fill out the registration form from any smartphone, tablet or computer. The registration templates are simple to edit and JotForm is free.
Here’s another solution for registration. The best part is, Google forms is free and comes with your Google/Gmail account. It is quite easy to set up a registration form for the event you are organizing, using Google forms.
Bob Jones is the founder of REVwords.com, an author, blogger, and coach with 39 years of pastoral experience. Bob is also an Advance Coach with the ABNWT Resource Centre. You can connect with Bob here.